Water, wind, energy and pain

Last updated on Wed, 14th Sep 2022

It’s five days since my gastric bypass surgery, and over the last few days I’ve faced quite a few challenges – some expected and some unexpected – which I thought I’d share:

My new full time job is drinking water

I cannot physically get enough water into myself. They say that I should be aiming to drink at least 2 litres of water a day, but I can only take small sips. Pre-surgery I could always drink half a litre of water in one go. But my tiny new stomach means that it now takes a whole 4 hours to drink one litre – or 8 hours to drink two. That means I have to constantly drink throughout the day – and that actually takes a high degree of concentration and effort.

I have sooooo much wind

I seem to need to burp after every single sip of water. I don’t know if there’s something wrong about the way that I drink, but I always seem to swallow some air along with the water, and that air has to come back out. My stomach isn’t big enough to store a lot of air, so the burping (along with the drinking) is near constant. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the farting is pretty bad too.

I struggle with really low energy

At the moment I’m only managing to consume around 500 calories a day through my liquid diet, and about 40g of protein. With tiny portions for each meal – which at the moment is mostly porridge, scrambled egg, or soup – I’m only getting around 150 calories in a meal. And so when it comes to doing any activity, such as walking the dog, I get really tired quite quickly. I was out earlier in the park and had to stop for a rest on the bench after about 20 minutes. I’m hoping that if I can get a bit more protein in my diet that might help, but I’m finding that difficult to do with a liquid diet, and when (like me) you don’t have much imagination about what to cook.

The pain got better quicker than expected.

For the first 24 hours after surgery every slightest movement was agony. I was constantly asking my nurses for more and more pain medication. But only five days later and the pain around my laproscopic wounds today is actually not too bad. In fact, I haven’t needed to take any pain medication today, because I don’t feel I need it. There’s still some discomfort when I bend over or if I try to lie on my side in bed, but not enough to need pain relief.